I visited two libraries in NM today — the resort town of Angel Fire (this is actually a 501 non-profit library established by those in the community some 20 years ago; get a bit of state aid, but all else paid for by the Friends through fundraising); and a small town called Abiquiu (go ahead, see if you can find it on the map). Two ends of a spectrum in terms of serving small communities.

Anyway, Angel Fire’s connectivity was interesting. They have a 2-hop line of site configuration (one hop down the hill; another hop further down) and then a connection to a T1. At the end of the day, they get maybe 200-300kbps which is shared by 5 public access computers and 2 staff computers and a wireless router. Particularly during the summer and winter seasons, things get really bogged down. Also, strong winds and storms affect the connection – so reliability is an issue.

They are “promised” DSL later this year, but have heard that one before.

A second point of interest is that the director, who does not have an MLS, comes from the San Francisco area and is a techie. Left there to find a quieter place; plus liked golfing and skiing. His plans, provided they can get the funding are really quite interesting -- wants to go Linux and set up virtual machines, etc. Some pretty interesting ideas on how to move the technology forward; but bandwidth will continue to be a bottleneck.

Abiquiu was, shall we say, challenged. They had 7 public access computers — all old; they supposedly have a tech guy that the library pays something (he started as a volunteer). But, of the 7, 4 had error messages on them; there were pop-ups on another; I could go down the list. The person there didn’t have a clue what type of connection or speed. From what I could see there on the floor it appeared to be DSL. I was the only one there at the time (before school got out) and tried doing some surfing. Should have been reasonably fast, but I suspect that the age of the machines and lack of maintenance kept things pretty slow. Also, the machines either needed new video cards or new monitors. Not a particularly good experience. But, the point here is that they had a faster connection (best I could tell), but it yielded a slower and less satisfactory user experience.

Just a brief report.....oh, and it was a beautiful ride up through Taos and on to Angel Fire.